A Calloused America

Posted by johnhouk on Jan 04, 2009
 John R. Houk
© January 4, 2008

Has America become so used to hearing, seeing and reading about terrorism outside of America that our great nation has become calloused? Have we forgotten the horror of a major attack by Islamic terrorists meant to terrorize America? Indeed those Islamic terrorist had won a major battle beginning an American response to Global terrorism at America.

You might say, “How?” We have not had a successful attack on American soil since September 11, 2001.

That is the irony is it not?

The highly criticized (by the Left) Homeland Security methods of keeping America safe (e.g. the Patriot Act) from Islamic terrorist attacks has ironically become a tool of the Left to be critical of American military action in foreign lands (e.g. Iraq).

The callousness of Left funneled information on foreign terrorism and the lack of Homeland terrorism has reduced Americans for the most part to an “I don’t care about fighting terrorism when my job and family is threatened by an emerging economic disaster.”

Americans have forgotten how much the death and destruction perpetrated upon America changed the way America lives. My God I remember a time when you could greet or say goodbye to loved ones at the ramp of an Airline. Those days are gone forever or at least until the West wakes up and gets tough with an Islamic culture that breeds violence for every perceived offense that comes their way.

When American-Muslims or Muslims of foreign nations living in America are on a flight, fear can cause misunderstanding in which the Muslims are scrutinized to their detriment. Why? Even though no terrorist attacks have occurred on American soil since 9/11, the American public is aware that there are Muslims in America that support the Wahhabi-Sunni Islam or Shi’ite (err…Iran) Islam. If indeed a moderate Muslim ignores the tenets of violence in their scripture in favor of the scriptures of peace (which due to abrogation is the other way around in Islam), then the moderate Muslim (who publicly ignores or is ignorant of abrogation) is indeed a victim of their true Islamic co-religionists. Then there are Muslims who totally comprehend Islamic abrogation and use Western civil rights laws to flaunt their ability to practice their Theo-Political cult under the protection of the law. This is like the “Flying Imams” who purposely acted in the manner that the 9/11 terrorists purportedly acted on flights that became weapons.

Please America; soften the calluses of your understanding of Islam to keep the vigilance of a free America absent of Islamic aspects of Sharia Law. The very same thing America’s Mother Country – Britain – has effectively failed to do. Britain is unwittingly paying the price socially and culturally to their own Western Mores and traditions by allowing anti-Western Sharia Law to find roots.

Jonah Goldberg has an excellent essay concerning this callousness of the minds of Americans. Take a gander of the essay.

JRH 1/4/08
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The squeegee men of the New World Order

By Jonah Goldberg
January 2, 2009 / 6 Teves 5769
Jewish World Review

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | If you're old enough to have been around in the 1980s, and possibly even if you aren't, you probably know the name Leon Klinghoffer. A wheelchair-bound elderly businessman, Klinghoffer was murdered and dumped over the side of the cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists in 1985.

But do you remember Gavriel Holtzberg? He was an American executed in Mumbai in November. His wife Rivka, an Israeli, was six months pregnant and was also executed at close range. How about Naomi and Alan Scherr? Naomi was Alan's 13-year-old daughter. They were killed while having dinner in their Mumbai hotel. Paul Johnson Jr.? He was one of several Americans kidnapped and executed in 2004 in Saudi Arabia.

We don't remember these names because nobody made a big deal about them. It's not that their deaths were considered trivial events when they happened. But it was merely the news of the day, maybe the week, and little more.

Now compare that to Klinghoffer. His murder was a worldwide event. Presidents and prime ministers thundered their outrage. Newspapers editorialized ad nauseam about the cowardice and villainy of the perpetrators.

Yasir Arafat's PLO had to play along, pretending they would never be involved in such a heinous act. Farouk Kaddoumi, Arafat's "foreign minister," suggested that Klinghoffer's wife had murdered and dumped her husband overboard to collect the insurance money. For the record, the Klinghoffers took the cruise to celebrate their 36th wedding anniversary.

In 1993, near the height of America's anger over out-of-control crime, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a seminal article for the American Scholar on "defining deviancy down." Moynihan argued that crime had gotten so out of control, Americans responded by simply defining deviancy down until many crimes seemed normal.

One of his more famous examples was the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. On Feb. 14, 1929, seven gangsters were killed by rival gangsters. "The nation was shocked. The event became legend ..." Moynihan observed. "I leave it to others to judge, but it would appear that the society in the 1920s was simply not willing to put up with this degree of deviancy. In the end, the Constitution was amended, and Prohibition, which lay behind so much gangster violence, ended." But by the early 1990s, the United States was experiencing the equivalent of a St. Valentine's Day Massacre every weekend.

One response to the crime epidemic was to redefine violent crime as a "public health issue." Traditional law enforcement was simply incapable of dealing with the "social pathologies" and "root causes" of the wave of gun violence and the like.

Fortunately, this approach, while far from dead, was relegated to the back burner by the successes of anti-crime initiatives in places like Rudy Giuliani's New York. The solution, it largely turned out, wasn't to become more tolerant of criminality by recasting it as a cultural or lifestyle choice or by invoking root causes (as The New York Times often did), but to become less tolerant of crime. In New York, turnstile jumpers, graffiti artists, even the infamous "squeegee men" were treated as the lawbreakers they were. One heartening moral of the story is that sometimes deviancy can be defined back up.

We learned a similar moral after 9/11. For years — starting around the time of Klinghoffer's murder, as it happens — policymakers in both parties debated how to define terrorism. Is it a law-and-order issue or a military threat? If it's a military threat, how do we define a "proportionate response" — this legalistic phrase entered the national-security lexicon back then, too. By the end of the 1990s, the best and the brightest of the Clinton administration found the answer in a lawerly kind of proportionality, blowing up empty office buildings as a way to "send a message" in response to attacks on America and her interests.

After 9/11, the gloves were off. The far left beseeched the government to retaliate with, at most, a proportionate response, but no one cared. We toppled the Taliban as a warm-up act. Terrorists weren't criminals anymore, they were enemy combatants, ineligible for the Geneva Conventions.

But the war in Iraq and reports of American zeal in the war on terror have left a sour taste in our mouths. That there have been no terrorist attacks on our soil only bolsters the sense that terrorism is manageable, even banal. Barack Obama leads a counteroffensive from a legal establishment that wants to treat terrorists like any other criminals. Terrorists in Mumbai or Jeddah are little more than the squeegee men of the New World Order.

This vain legalism will run its course for a good long while, I suspect. And we will hear and then forget a lot of names before we relearn some hard lessons.
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 A Calloused America
John R. Houk
© January 4, 2008

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The squeegee men of the New World Order
Jonah Goldberg Archives
© 2006 [sic] TMS

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